Events

The 5 startups that launched at Onlab 14th Demo Day

Wednesday, April 12th: Open Network Lab (Onlab) hosted its 14th Batch Demo Day in its Tokyo office. We have recapped the highlights of the event below.

Open Network Lab’s Seed Accelerator Program has completed its 14th batch after starting in 2010. Startups and entrepreneurs from all around the world apply to Onlab’s program that is run twice a year. With over 80 graduates, Onlab’s portfolio consists of variety of categories and stages of startups. After graduating Onlab’s program, 49.2% of startups have received funding in the next round. This number leaps even higher when filtering only the recent batches. Onlab hopes to continue incubating successful entrepreneurs to further the startup community.

The 14th Batch consists of 5 startups that began its journey in Onlab from applying in November. After going through our program from January to March, the startups were extremely excited to present in Demo Day. All the startups were innovative and are likely to disrupt their respective industries. In particular, Cansell, the startup that co-won the Best Team Award and Audience Award, and Toreru, which co-won the Best Team Award were crowd favorites.
Below are descriptions of each of the 14th Batch.

Cansell is a service that allows users to sell hotel bookings that they would otherwise cancel. Instead of paying a cancellation fee, sellers can list their hotel bookings. Buyers can buy these bookings at a discounted price, providing a win-win for everyone. The company hopes to expand beyond hotel bookings into other categories and industries to disrupt the cancellation market.https://cansell.jp/

Toreru is a cloud service focused in the intellectual property market. As a current practicing patent lawyer, Toreru’s CEO understands the inefficient and often legacy methods of communication and work of patent lawyers and their clients. Toreru is a product that is aimed to increase efficiency to lower costs, allowing patent lawyers to manage more clients and hence make more revenue. The company hopes to use the data acquired from its services to create a new intellectual property business.https://toreru.jp/

nimomin is a tool to manage properties to efficiently switch between AirBnB, monthly apartments, and other guest housing services. The tool is equipped to handle Japan’s new law of only allowing guest housing services for 180 days throughout the year. The service not only allows for efficient management, but aims to provide the best revenue for property managers. The company plans to continue partnering with guest housing services while expanding its reach to rental conference spaces, share houses, and event spaces.https://www.nimomin.info/

Café Wifi is an app and web service that allows remote workers to find their ideal work space by offering wifi, outlet, seating, and other information that pertains to remote workers. The service already is used in over 90 countries worldwide, and lists over 3,000 cafés and spaces in its app.

During the program, the company conducted user interviews with remote workers and cafés to further brush up their service. They plan to test a seat reservation service to let users find, sit, and pay without waiting in line.http://cafewifi.com/

PSYGIG operates a SaaS analytics platform for mobility IoT products to increase safety. They are able to reduce the time needed to process data as well as lower engineering costs by accumulating all sensor data onto their platform. With PSYGIG, clients will be able to not only identify potential faults in their product, but understand the reasoning behind it through gaining all information on the cloud and big data processing.

During the program, the company tested and verified its assumptions in the mobility IoT market while developing its minimum viable product.http://psygig.com/

15th Batch applications now open!

Onlab has started accepting applications for its 15th batch Seed Accelerator Program from April. It will be a 3 month, intensive program designed to help entrepreneurs go to the next step of their startup stage. Onlab provides advice and mentoring not just on the startup’s product and service, but also specifically about fundraising in Japan, as well as pitch practice. Features of the program includes:

・Support from the DG Incubation investment team as well as staff with business experience
・Mentoring from Onlab graduates and other experts and specialists
・Usage of incubation facilities
・Funding for the program

As the oldest accelerator program in Japan, our staff has amassed a wealth of startup knowledge, both success and failures. We highly recommend talking to Onlab graduates to know more about the program!

The deadline to apply is noon on Monday, May 22nd. The program is set to begin in early July. We look forward to your applications, and hope we can work together to create startups that can excel in a global stage!